How can I be older than a Prime Minister?????

The phrase 'you know you're getting old when....' has been applied at the start of many jokes.
Among them are:

• Your back goes out more than you do.
  It takes twice as long to look half as good.
  Your asleep but others worry that you may be dead.

Personally my favourite end to that particular line came from Scottish comedian Billy Connolly who said that you really know when you are getting old when you drop something on the floor and you make a noise when you start picking it up again.

Just try it - you'll see.

For me, however, I really, really knew I was getting old last week when I saw David Cameron enter the famous black door of 10, Downing Street.

For this was the first time that a Prime Minister - yes, a Prime Minister - was younger than I am.

How can this be I wondered? (I'm probably wondering it in the pic above actually...)

I still regard myself as a young man (well, mid-40s is still a bit young, isn't it?) so how come while I'm sitting here writing this, a man younger than me literally has his finger on the nuclear button?

Where did all those years go?

The thing about age is that it really does creep up on you unexpectedly and it jolts you when something that seems quite fresh in your mind is now regarded as 'nostalgia'

Take this week. The BBC has been showing a number of dramas about the 1980s and I particularly enjoyed the somewhat shocking but riveting account of the rise and fall of Boy George in the film Worried About The Boy on Sunday night.

To me this all seemed as it if was practically yesterday. The sound track of the early 1980s music sounded pretty contemporary even today, the apparently outlandish New Romantic fashions seemed pretty run-of-the-mill now and I knew many of the characters featured in the film because I had grown up with them. And yet this 'recent event' in my mind all took place nearly 30 years ago.

Yes, it was nearly three decades ago that Boy George first appeared on our screen on Top Of The Pops. I can still picture where I was when I first saw him and silently asked the question millions of us were thinking that night: 'Is that a girl or what?'

Of course, people say that you are only as old as you feel and I think there is something in that. In our paper we often write about people in their 60s, 70s or 80s who do athletic endeavours that would have frightened me ten years ago, and equally I'm sure we are all aware of what I would call 'young fogeys' - people who are worried about adult issues far, far too many years before they should.

So, I do hope that our new Prime Minister (and his fresh-faced deputy who is also depressingly the same tender age) have that vital mixture of youthful energy with a mature edge which should characterise their age to get them through.

I still think it seems incredibly young to be doing a 'proper' job like that though. Or should I just accept that I am older than I think I am?

Pass the Horlicks.

The end of the decade...what, already????

It came as something of a shock the other day to realise that we are a matter of just 12 weeks or so away from the end of this decade. Yes, not just the end of the year, but the end of a whole ten-year period.

Why I found this somewhat surprising is because in many ways it doesn’t feel as though we’ve ever properly defined this period at all and it seems odd to wave goodbye to a decade we have barely said hello to.

One of the reasons for the lack of identity for this time is that even now, as we enter the last weeks of 2009, nobody has really found a decent, universally understood name for it. We all have images flash into our mind the moment anybody says the 1970s (Abba, punk, Silver Jubilee etc), the 1980s (Thatcher, new romantics, the wedding of Charles & Di etc), or the 1990s (Oasis, the rise of New Labour and Britpop) but this decade’s name just doesn’t have the same immediacy. The phrase ‘the noughties’ just doesn’t do it in the instant-warmth, instant-memory sphere does it?

The truth is, when I think we do look back on the noughties (for that looks to be the name which will go down in history), I suspect any of its great music or cultural events will be dwarfed by the really bad stuff. Forget the Beatles being the enduring image of the 1960s, for instance; I’m afraid this past period will best be remembered for 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, climate change, economic meltdown and that appalling fellow George W Bush.


But, if the noughties were a bad dream best forgotten, what are we going into next?

Are we going into a nice easy-to- identify, well-named decade like the 20s, 40s or 80s again? No, of course not. Sadly, we’ve got another decade with an ‘identity crisis’.

The preferred name (apparently) for the next ten year stretch (2010-2019) is the ‘twenty-tens’. Others prefer the ‘two thousand and tens’, some go for ‘the tens’ and the odd person (well, me to be specific) prefers ‘the teens’. OK, I accept that ‘the teens’ is fine for the year 2014 but not so great for 2011 but, heck, I still like it.

Of course, the one thing that can cheer us all about the decade to come is that we can already see some bright lights on the horizon.

There is nothing in the America constitution that could allow George Walker Bush to stand again (although I understand there are more Bush’s lurking in the, err, bushes) and let’s not forget this country will be given an enormous boost in 2012 when we will have the Olympics and hopefully six years later if we get the football World Cup. Even if you’re not a sports fan, you have to admit that at least it’s something positive to look forward to after the pretty uninspiring and rather bloody decade we’re vacating.


The end of a period like this will, inevitably, mean a plethora of newspaper and magazine reviews where we look at the highlights and lowlights of the years gone by. There will be Best of the Noughties CDs galore and you can bet your life that the TV schedules are already bulging with retrospective programmes about a decade I suspect many of us will actually quickly want to forget.

So what has (apart from the truly gruesome things mentioned earlier) really defined the noughties in the UK? I personally suspect it will be the rise of reality TV in all its guises from Big Brother and X Factor to the reality-TV-for-people-who-claim-they-
don’t-like-reality-TV such as The Apprentice and Dragons’ Den. Such programmes have revolutionised TV and made everyone believe, sadly, that ‘celebrity’ is the ultimate profession to aim for.

So, reader, George W Bush and Simon Cowell could well be THE defining faces of the noughties.

Blimey.

Bring on the ‘teens’....